Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even should you not have a business and don't have any interest in Internet marketing (maybe you don't even know what that is), for those who have e-mail, you have experienced the nastier side of email marketing. You have probably seen the ads for email address lists that offer thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change.
You will be sure of just one thing: in the event the price is affordable, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these enormous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They have been comparable to some list of street addresses chosen from your telephone book.
Mostly, the addresses are harvested from forums, membership or pupil lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, and other places where people gather to innocently swap advice. They don't understand their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. They didn't request to be added to a mass email list. And they certainly did not request to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Picking email addresses is legal. But it is widely considered unethical. You will not go to jail or pay a fine. However, you might damage your business, maybe irreparably. The possible effects for breaking the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your business from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain name.